Bush home after long week of making nice

WASHINGTON — Few people in President Bush's entourage seemed happier to get home from Europe late Thursday night than Bush himself, who spent his week in meetings with three of the prickliest characters in current American foreign relations — President Jacques Chirac of France, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Unlike other American presidents, who often used trips to Europe as diversions from the scandals and politics of home, Bush spent four days in chocolate-making countries like Belgium eating his peas.

First, he had to make nice — in his fashion — on the American invasion of Iraq. "The policy in the past used to be, let's just accept tyranny for the sake of — well, you know, cheap oil, or whatever it may be, and just hope everything would be OK," Bush said at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Tuesday. "Well, that changed on September the 11th for our nation."

Second, he had to bring up hard issues like Russia's backsliding on democracy in a news conference with Putin. A respite came in Slovakia, where crowds cheered Bush's talk of freedom and the country's prime minister, Mikulas Dzurinda, raved about his meeting with the American president.

"I like Bush," Dzurinda told American reporters over lunch on Thursday. "You know why? Because he told me that he doesn't like to write, but he likes to speak to people, and I am the same."

President and prime minister also bonded, Dzurinda reported, over the complications of raising girls. "He has two daughters; I have two daughters," Dzurinda said. "The older is 20, the younger 17 — you can imagine." And did Bush commiserate about his party-loving twins?

Dzurinda wiped his brow with great drama and laughed. "We share some experiences," he replied.

One of the most closely watched dramas of the trip was the dinner Bush gave in Brussels on Monday night for Chirac at the 18th-century residence of the American ambassador to Belgium, former Utahn Tom C. Korologos. As it turned out, the dinner was so small, only about 10 people, that Korologos was not even invited to his own home. Because it was a "working dinner," which typically excludes spouses, Laura Bush had to find somewhere else to go, too.

So while the president, Chirac and a handful of others talked about Iran and Iraq, Korologos dined with Joe Hagin, the White House deputy chief of staff, at Vincent, a red-meat restaurant with big slabs of beef and butter in the window. Their companions included White House advance people who handle the logistics for presidential foreign trips.